My Favourite Poison

Faith Zanetti is Kate Adie on vodka, a foreign correspondent for our times and the girl all mothers warn their sons about. Her intrepidness is matched only by her chutzpah and her ability to extract herself from amazing scrapes. Having been bowled over (literally) in Cairo by the charming but shadowy former KGB defector Alex Sorokin, Faith soon finds herself a suspect for the murder of Alex's wife. But more is to come as the ever-inventive plot snowballs to include Russian oligarchs, the ghosts of Chechen atrocities, bribery and corruption in Egyptian politics, murder, illegal exhumations in St Petersburg and yet another assassination by radioactive poison. The author sees the details of life and places as through a microscope, picking out jewels for us to savour, and the Zanetti books are comic thrillers of great distinction.